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Originally Posted by ubertuber
Shakran, it really appears that you're reading dksuddeth's posts in twisted ways solely to be argumentative. His statements that you've quoted, "The right. . . of bearing arms for a lawful purpose. . . is not a right granted by the Constitution", and "Neither is it in any manner dependent on that instrument for its existence" aren't so unclear to me.
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They're not unclear to me either. But what is also clear is that he has previously tried to convince us that the 2nd amendment gives us all the right to have guns. The 2nd amendment is part of the constitution which means his previous (wrong) statements are inconsistant with his latest (correct) statements.
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He's saying that the rights mentioned in the Bill of Rights (existing as amendments to the Consitution) aren't granted by those amendments that mention them. They ENSURED by those amendments, as they were rights that people naturally had - and a state of being ruled by a government shouldn't be able to change them.
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Yes but where the disagreement still lies is whether it is the right of EVERYONE to have a gun, or whether it is only the right of those in a
well regulated militia to have a gun.
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Also, your comment about the brevity and clarity of the 2nd Amendment doesn't help much - it merely shows that the thing can be read in more than one way.
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That's kinda my whole point. I'm glad you got that. I'm trying to get him to see that.
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The amendment says "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." [According to wikipedia, a copy made by the scribe who prepared the BOR carries different punctuation: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."] I read that to mean "The right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because a well regulated militia is necessary to have a free state."
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Grammatically you're wrong. Your second version simply switches "being necessary to the security of a free state" to a parenthetical phrase. It's also grammatically incorrect since removing the parenthetical phrase would leave us with "A well regulated militia the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Ignoring the obvious comma error, we have a sentence fragment at the beginning of the runon sentence. It doesn't make any sense. So this scribe wasn't any better at grammar than he was at copying the original.
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I don't see the beginning as a conditional clause at all - it's a justification.
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There are many, MANY people who disagree with you. And if it's a justification, why don't they justify any other amendment? I mean, a free press is certainly necessary to the security of a free state. Why didn't they preface the 1st with that justification? The logical conclusion is that they put that phrase in there for a very specific reason, which was to explain that the gun-rights amendment was not a national suicide pact, and that if you want to have a gun you have to be in some sort of well regulated militia.
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Incidentally, the wikipedia article reads it in a third way (see the very first sentence at the top): "Amendment II (the Second Amendment) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, declares the necessity for "a well regulated militia", and prohibits infringement of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms"." Please excuse my quotation mark madness.
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I'm sure that you know as well as I do that using wikipedia as a source for ANYTHING is dubious at best.
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All of that stuff I typed above is incidental to my main point, which is the same that I made in post 27. I now quote my self, for repetitive goodness:
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I'm not sure why you think we're trying to score points on each other. We each have an opinion. We're advancing those opinions. If that's "scoring points," and you are saying that "scoring points" is wrong, then you might as well shut down the whole politics forum, because advancing opinions is the point of political debate.